The Government of India presented the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 in Lok Sabha 19 July 2016. The impugned Bill seeks to amend the Citizenship Act, 1955 whereunder the acquisition and determination of Indian citizenship procedure have been enacted. The Bill aims to extend citizenship to an individual who belongs to minorities such as Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Parsis and Sikhs hailing from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who enters into India without valid visa or travel documents.

“Ethnic conflict“ has become a very fashionable notion. However, it was not always so. Indeed, in the not-so-distant past such a notion was practically unknown. In the pre-modern times, conflicts were assumed to take place between power-holders, over pieces of land. The former sought to seize, control and exploit all resources within the latter, including the population that was also perceived and treated only as yet another resource for exploitation.

It might not be evident at first sight, but we are, in fact, living in the most peaceful era of human history. The battles of decolonization and the two world wars having come to an end already decades ago, the world has entered an unprecedented age of geopolitical stability.

7 July 2017 was a momentous day for disarmament and arms control. On that day, 122 states approved the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, often called ‘the ban treaty’, at the United Nations in New York. Once 50 states have ratified the treaty, nuclear weapons will be illegal. The agreement will prohibit the possession of nuclear weapons for all states in the same way as the chemical and biological weapon conventions have prohibited those weapons for all.

On May 18, 2017, the order of provisional measures has been given by the International Court of Justice (hereinafter referred to as ICJ) in favor of India in Kulbhushan Jadhav case between India and Pakistan. Some scholars have expressed their concerns over the repercussions that India might have to face due to its actions of involving the ICJ in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case.

The global nuclear justice quest has been culminated by adopting a new regime that intends to dilute the Westphalian Exceptionalism and tries to establish the Universal Constitutionalism based on UN Charter’s goal of violence free world enunciated in its preamble. But its plausibility and pragmatism would be tested in the years ahead.

Modern diplomacy does not imply one should ignore the lessons of contemporary history. Nor should one sacrifice prudent long-term policies for the perception of short-term national gains. Both may have taken root in Mikhiel Saakashvilli’s reign in the Republic of Georgia. An observer might wonder why Georgia has put itself in positions that have reduced its sovereignty.

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